The relationship between retargeting and tag management
This is a guest post by Scott Grossman, SVP of Business Development at BrightTag.
With the advent of real-time exchange-traded media, more and more retailers are using retargeting as a technique to lure customers back to their site to make a purchase. Data comes in many forms – behavioral, contextual, user-generated. It is produced across a vast array of digital experiences - web, email, mobile, kiosks, and increases or decreases in value based on factors like recency and frequency. Ingesting and analyzing all this data to inform bidding strategy lies at the core of effective retargeting.
Now, getting to that valuable first-party data is not an easy effort for retargeting firms. Some retargeting companies use their pixel to gather data from the retailer’s site, some utilize a retailer’s product feed while others use a combination of both. Each of these processes requires heavy lifting on behalf of both the retailer and retargeting firm.
Enabling a tag management system makes the activation of retargeting platforms much easier. At BrightTag, we help retailers ease the on-boarding process not only through one-click pixel activation, but more importantly, by delivering more first-party data in real-time to boost the effectiveness of retargeting platforms.
Chango is an example of a retargeting provider that has used first-party data effectively through its BrightTag ONE™ integration. A recent case study illustrates how integrated search retargeting through a tag management system enhanced a retailer’s ROI:
Site retargeting programs typically require placing a vendor’s tags on key pages like product detail or search results to create targetable segments. BrightTag’s technology allowed the retailer’s agency of record and search retargeter (Chango) to leverage unique page interactions – functions such as add to cart, uploading video reviews, search refinements, etc. – as well as very granular detail about actual products purchased when creating increasingly sophisticated segmentation strategies. The BrightTag ONE platform also helped Chango extend data collection to include on-site searches and search refinements, widening the aperture of first-party data use from just landing pages to all pages.
The case above is just one example of a retail client successfully using retargeting. More than 55% of BrightTag’s retail clients are using one or more retargeting vendor, the highest usage among any vertical. Furthermore, retargeting providers are using the BrightTag ONE integration platform to take in more granular data that in turn allows for more informed media strategy.
The chart at right illustrates that across BrightTag’s clients using retargeting platforms, item price, quantity and order ID are collected with the highest frequency, while discount, promo code and product gender are the least popular data elements collected. Based on the ease of collecting this valuable client data, we expect more BrightTag retail clients to take advantage of retargeting technologies in the future.